Saodat Ismailova Midnight Sun

Working between Paris and Tashkent, Ismailova came of age in the post-Soviet era Uzbekistan. Her work interweaves rituals, myths and dreams within the tapestry of everyday life. 

Her films investigate the historically complex and layered culture of Central Asia. Frequently based around oral stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalised modernity, these consciousness expanding works hover between visible and invisible worlds. 

Spanning film, sound, installation and sculpture, Ismailova often uses archival footage alongside striking iconography and hypnotic narratives that trace the loss marked by successive regime change to the spiritual memory of the region, and the impact of human activity on the environment.

The exhibition includes the premiere of Swan Lake 2025 alongside three key works, Zukhra 2013, As We Fade 2024 and Melted into the Sun 2024. Together, they consider thresholds, transitions and power, memory and personal and collective consciousness. They think about the void, the suspended state during political and psychic change, where dreaming becomes possible, but which can also be subject to manipulation and control. 

The exhibition is structured around the central work Swan Lake, a double-channel film composed from existing feature films from post-Soviet Central Asia. It seeks to capture the spirit of a period of immense transition in the region’s recent history — Perestroika — a time that remains a neglected part of collective experience. It was an era of upheaval, struggle, and survival: the collapse of an idea alongside an extreme pitch of hope, a time of losing ground, of liberation, grief, rage, and joy.

These years were marked by strange and iconic figures — the hypnotist Kashpirovsky, the legendary rock group Kino, and the ballet Swan Lake, which the vast Soviet Union broadcast on a continuous loop for almost 24 hours, while its citizens, unaware of what was unfolding, witnessed the disappearance of their country. Those hours became a ghostly overture to the collapse of the Soviet Union, signed away beyond the eyes of its people. The film is dedicated to the children of Perestroika, and to the forgotten films that captured the spirit of those turbulent times.